Engineered Performance Ropes
Gavin Smith
Over the years our focus has been to develop, use and select high performance ropes for mission critical applications in the Entertainment and Aviation Industries. Our proprietary and innovative Australian designed and manufactured engineered ropes deliver the highest results, quality and safety for any given application.
Let us introduce you to some of our highly customised performance ropes!
Our performance Technora fibre rope or Trak 12 as we call it is the tractor of all running rigging rope, it does all the hard work. A high performance rope needs to rely on some very critical factors for it to be used in the entertainment industry for stunt and circus rigging. This rope is our own design, based on careful research and analysis and testing. To have just one rope do it all is like trying to drink seawater, you’ll get some of it in but then realise it’s not going to keep you alive very long! The Trak 12 rope is made from 100% Technora yarn. The pic length is the braid length of the same strand occurring in the same position down the braid, it relates to the angle of the braid. If we reduce this length the rope will stay a little more round but lower the maximum break load, increase diameter, and reduce the ease of splicing. It has a high strand twist or twist per metre and it’s a 2 x 12 construction with a specialised treatment. This allows it to easily handle high radius friction turns, having a higher melting point than other fibres. It is the only rope of choice for our FRD (Fast Rope Device) . Our 12 mm diameter Trak 12 has a break strength of over 70 kN or 7 Tonne! What rope are you using?
Our Circus 3 or 4 ply ropes are made with the highest quality cotton yarn, they will typically have a high twist per metre rate and a short pic length, this is due largely to the way natural fibre behaves and interestingly when it’s wet, we have a slight increase in strength. When we want to reinforce the cotton rope we simply introduce an internal core of synthetic 12 strand fibre rope, that is then made redundant inside the cotton rope or it can be made to share a percentage of the load being placed on the cotton rope. This percentage is critical as you don't want the core to take the higher percentage of the weight and the outer cotton rope have very little, this can cause a bunching up effect or elephant foot at the lower end of the rope usually at the trapeze bar end. We use to use a very long time ago an inner wire rope for reinforcing cotton rope, but found that when we worked above the bar on certain tricks the wire would kink, plus it requires specialised tools to terminate the eye splices. With the correct methods of assembly and design synthetic ropes eliminate the risk of a kinked wire core and safely reinforces cotton rope.
Our other specialty ropes include circus ropes that are used for web spinning, cloud swing, corde lise and other hybrid apparatus that require a unique and innovative approach to successfully and safely build aerial apparatus.
Our range of engineered ropes can be customised to your specific application. No other company in the world today takes the safe and pragmatic approach to design, selection and use as we do and that’s why the big guys look to use for procurement of the finest hand built equipment anywhere in the world today.